Ag Global Village

From a publication named Dairy Herd Management, the following: “It may seem that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine holds little impact on milk prices. But for farmers in the United Kingdom, already caught in a supermarket price war driving prices down, the Russia versus Ukraine conflict was the weight that tipped the scales against them.” Indeed, dairy imports and exports are very much in the news these days and the dairy industry in the United States is being challenged. I talked with John Newton, who is an Agricultural and Applied Economics Association member and works for the American Farm Bureau Federation. "It's been a tough few years for dairy farmers. Record high prices in 2014 due to a surging demand environment and surging exports and shortly after US farmers responded to the high prices and increased demand by expanding their own output, you saw milk production in the EU begin to increase significantly and then Russia and China, the two largest dairy importers, essentially slow their purchases. Russia actually closed the door on Western agricultural products, so the demand and the bottom fell out of the dairy markets and prices went south pretty quickly.”